Mid-Week Mini: Why Chicken is Called Chicken?

In this week’s Mid-Week Mini Episode, we talk about why chicken is called chicken when other meats have fancy names.

Have you ever noticed that we eat chicken, but when we eat other meats, we don’t usually call what we eat cow, pig, or deer?

The reason goes back to the Norman conquest of England in 1066. William the Conqueror invaded from Normandy, defeated the English king Harold at the Battle of Hastings, and established a new ruling class in England. For the next few centuries, England became a place where the people raising much of the food and the people eating the expensive versions of that food often spoke different languages.

The ordinary English population largely spoke Old English, while the Norman aristocracy spoke a variety of French. The English-speaking farmers tended the animals, so the everyday names for those animals remained English words. The animals were cows, pigs, sheep, and calves.

But when some of those animals arrived at the table as meat, the French vocabulary of the upper classes influenced what they were called. The French word boeuf gave English “beef,” porc gave us “pork,” and veau gave us “veal.” “Mutton” came through Anglo-French from a word for sheep, and “venison” came from French terminology connected with hunted game.

So why didn’t the same thing happen to chicken?

One likely reason is that chickens weren’t separated by social class in quite the same way as expensive livestock and hunted game. Chickens were common household animals, and poultry could be eaten across a much broader range of society. English did borrow the French word “poultry,” but it never displaced “chicken” as the ordinary name for the meat itself.

And this linguistic divide is still sitting on our dinner plates almost a thousand years later. The farmer raised a cow, the nobleman ate beef; the farmer raised a pig, the nobleman ate pork; but when somebody cooked a chicken, it stayed chicken.